Abstract

This dialogue is about what might be considered appropriate education for the children of the post-colonial truck stop that is the Aboriginal community of Elliott in Australia’s remote Northern Territory. It builds on a paper, The Anatomy of a Post-colonial Truck Stop: Some Dilemmas Facing Four Public Servants, presented at the Tenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities Montreal 2012. The dialogue is based on a critical analysis of the new national curriculum, the Australian Curriculum (AC), currently being introduced into all Australian schools, and the lived experience of teachers working in Aboriginal schools. It contrasts the case for the application of Australia’s recently introduced national curriculum with the case for a locally negotiated curriculum that takes account of Article 14 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. This dialogue has a wider application than the Australian context in that it raises raises questions about the competing roles of the school as a cultural agent for the political entity that owns it and as an ethnographically sensitive seeker of transformational curriculum outcomes for minorities entrusted to its care.